Bent Spoke writes: The king of vacation rental sites, VRBO, was recently purchased by expedia. Now they are being accused of double dipping, for slapping a 4-10% surcharge onto rentals. This is on top the $1500 a year owners are already charged to list their properties. Suddenly, viewings have plunged, bookings are down, and owners are looking for the exit. Could VRBO be the next big website to slip under the waves?

- Was knocked off my bike while doing 25k, while in a bike lane (truck turned right in front of me while I was beside him). I ended up in emerg.
- Driving my car to work (a rare occurrence), I missed getting t-boned by a pickup, by 6 inches. He hit 2 other cars beside me when I hit the brakes.
- Other day I got in my car after I biked home, and then swore at a slow biker who took up the whole lane: he was ignoring the 1-meter wide bike lane beside him.
- saw a biker nearly get hit when he ran a stop sign at a 4-way, where a car had been waiting then started to go, then slammed on the brakes. Biker waved cheerily.
- Nearly got hit by a car turning left onto highway, as I crossed the highway on my green light: he was tailgating a van, didn't see me, he skidded sideways to a stop.
- And virtually every day a car mirror whizzes past at less then 1 foot, doing 60-70k .

So what?

Well indisputably, bikers do stupid things. However I note there seem to be a lot more drivers (most who never bike), than there are bikers. Without question, driving is more frustration inducing than biking. Usually due to traffic. Which leads to a lot of unhappy, near road-rage individuals out there behind the wheel. And that's not likely going to change any-time soon.

In fact, I think all the bikers could disappear tomorrow, and the drivers would still be just as neurotic and unhappy.

What these car drivers should learn is that many of us ride because we used to drive everywhere, but ended up hating what it made us become.

Bent Spoke writes: In the latest instalment of the bizarre, "Vancouver has become the first city in Canada to regulate illegal marijuana dispensaries" CTV. To wit, despite a long history of legal tolerance to pot, "Police and prosecution services in all Canadian jurisdictions are capable of pursuing criminal charges for cannabis possession" wikipedia.

It would seem that cases like Marc Emery shed some light on the situation: The US can exert inordinate pressure on foreign government policy.

Disclaimer: I am Canadian, and don't smoke pot. However, I don't want to see my kids saddled with a criminal record for what amounts to out-of-control political lobbying.

Despite the colourful rhetoric, the point is well taken. How many spoken languages does the average person know? Yet when it comes to programming, we are all supposed to learn a new languages every week. This is one of the rationales behind JSI, a JavaScript Interpreter (http://jsish.org). ie. when it comes to web development, you should only ever need to know two languages C and javascript.

When you know a language well, there's no problem writing good code in it. But truly few can claim to know C++ well enough to make that assertion. The language is far too big and complicated and provides too many ways to do the same thing.

Aside from all the tax implications, I assume one of the reasons you are considering is that your kids could easily move to the US and work. But I don't know how much of an advantage this is when the median (as opposed to average) income in the US is so low. That along with high health costs implies that most Americans have a pretty low standard of living. It may seem great if you are in the upper 1%, however living with such income disparity is pretty grim.